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have been left out of the wonderful process of science and its ability to reveal so much about nature. I’m heartbroken for their kids. On top of that, I feel bad for all of us. How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society? How did we exclude so many people from the knowledge won with great sacrifice by our ancestors? Perhaps in the coming decades we can turn this around and include everyone—people in nonscientific fields and professions as well as the professional scientist, engineer, and educator. Perhaps by celebrating evolution, we can open minds and unlock more of our vast human potential.
    Despite the resistance from part of my audience (not to mention from a large portion of the American public), I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described in my half-hour presentation. Certainly I suspect that Ken Ham can. It’s just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it seems as though Ham and his followers just can’t handle the truth. They throw aside their common sense and cling to the hope that there’s something that makes it okay to not think for themselves. The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos of astounding dimensions. If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all other creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it.
    Ken Ham, his followers, myself, and everyone else—we are all in this together. We’re all a product of the same evolutionary processes. Here’s hoping we can work together to bring the children of the creationists’ preachers’ flocks to a more enlightened, boundless way of thinking about the world around us.

 
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    CREATIONISM AND THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
    It’s not just Ken Ham and his Answers in Genesis ministry. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of arguments against evolution from people who find it objectionable on religious or emotional or philosophical grounds. Often these disputes boil down to the simple, dead-end argument from incredulity: “It cannot be true, because I find it so hard to believe that it’s true.” But sometimes creationists take a more interesting, science-inspired line of attack and insist that evolution is not physically possible, because no system can naturally become more complex over time. More specifically, they cite evolution for violating one of the most well-established principles in science, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
    In commonsense terms, the Second Law is this: Given the chance, balls roll downhill; they never roll uphill on their own. Put another way, energy tends to spread out: Heat spreads out, and lakes never spontaneously freeze on a warm summer day. Creationists seem to think that the human species has likewise been running downhill since The Fall, since our ancestors Adam and Eve screwed up. Creationists hear the Second Law of Thermodynamics and say, “Ah, hah! See, our whole world is a machine winding down—death to everyone.”
    By the way, rest assured that there is a First and Third Law of Thermodynamics; there’s even a Zeroth Law. While these are cool (sorry) in their own way, they don’t come up in creationists’ diatribes.
    To be sure, the Second Law of Thermodynamics really does contribute to a general winding down of the world around us. It explains why no one can build a perpetual motion machine. Somewhere, someplace in any machine, you’re going to lose some energy to heat. When it comes to making something go or happen, there’s no free lunch. The following quotation is irresistible; it’s from the renowned twentieth-century astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington:
    â€œThe law that entropy always increases—the Second Law of